General software recommendations.

sixteen-bit · Post by **sixteen-bit** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 4:59 pm

Hey all.
I was given a Mitac 5033 a few days ago; It's an older laptop with AMD 300MHz chip, 64MB of RAM and a 4GB disk.
I figured it would be perfect for my Dad to use as a general-purpose computing machine but I'm at a loss when it comes to suggesting software to install.

So far it's running windows 98 with:
Firefox
WinAmp
OpenOffice.org

Am I missing some absolutely killer app that'd come in really useful on a basic office computer? There's no IM because he'll never use it.

Luriden · Post by **Luriden** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 5:14 pm

AntiVir Guard, or any other free, lightweight anti-virus program.

az_bont · Post by **az_bont** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 5:32 pm

AbiWord is a very nice, very small office program that puts a lot less strain on the computer, as well as the user. Even if you still need to keep OpenOffice on there for spreadsheets and whatever else, it's still worth having - just make sure you get all the plugins for spell-checking, grammar checking, synonyms and the rest of it.

I did a full install, with all the plugins, and it only occupies 20.9MB of space on the drive

.

Perhaps a few freeware/shareware card games? They'd hardly use any space at all, and some of them are a lot more interesting than anything Microsoft has ever bundled with any version of Windows.

sixteen-bit · Post by **sixteen-bit** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 5:14 pm

Thanks, guys. I also installed a few more desktop games for him.

JuddWack · Post by **JuddWack** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 9:17 pm

Zone Alarm firewall

navi · Post by **navi** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 9:21 pm

JuddWack wrote:Zone Alarm firewall

burnerO · Post by **burnerO** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 11:20 am

I know that advising against Firefox may come across like heresy, but if it runs sluggishly you might want to try running the IE shell Maxthon. As strong of a Firefox advocate as I am, some systems just don't cut it.

WordWeb also owns my soul.

bizzle · Post by **bizzle** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 11:32 am

burnerO wrote:I know that advising against Firefox may come across like heresy, but if it runs sluggishly you might want to try running the IE shell Maxthon. As strong of a Firefox advocate as I am, some systems just don't cut it.

WordWeb also owns my soul.

HERETIC!!!111

burnerO · Post by **burnerO** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 11:37 am

This is coming from someone who installs Firefox on every system they encounter.

I tried loading it on a 333mhz before, and the load time was so irritating to the end user that they simply returned to using Internet Exploiter. If people are going to just do that, there at least ought to be some alternative.

bizzle · Post by **bizzle** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 11:58 am

burnerO wrote:This is coming from someone who installs Firefox on every system they encounter.

I tried loading it on a 333mhz before, and the load time was so irritating to the end user that they simply returned to using Internet Exploiter. If people are going to just do that, there at least ought to be some alternative.

I know, I am just kidding.

sixteen-bit · Post by **sixteen-bit** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:30 pm

Actually, I only have firefox installed there for my sake.
Even if it takes ages to load, Opera flys on hardware of this vintage

compacho · Post by **compacho** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 5:08 pm

Yeah, definately put Maxthon on that laptop. If you can, create a partition for him to store important files in.

Lunchbox · Post by **Lunchbox** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 5:15 pm

burnerO wrote:This is coming from someone who installs Firefox on every system they encounter.

I tried loading it on a 333mhz before, and the load time was so irritating to the end user that they simply returned to using Internet Exploiter. If people are going to just do that, there at least ought to be some alternative.

I installed it on my buddy's computer and it takes almost 5 minutes to load up, yet he still prefers it

Matt · Post by **Matt** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 5:47 pm

If you've got little ram it will eat it all up. I can't really think of anything else

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 8:21 pm

I tried loading it on a 333mhz before, and the load time was so irritating to the end user that they simply returned to using Internet Exploiter. If people are going to just do that, there at least ought to be some alternative.

On older systems, use Opera. I've installed it on a P233 with 32MB of RAM, and it worked absolutely fine. Certainly much, much, much faster than Internet Explorer 6 on the same system. Admittedly, it is commercial software, and therefore costs money, but it works a lot better than other current browsers on the same hardware, and it's cheaper than a hardware upgrade.

Skynet · Post by **Skynet** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 1:07 am

That's why I only use the Demo BA

Then you resize the banner. You once said how to do that I think. Either that or someone mentioned it.

But Opera worked fine on this old DX2 66 I had. Whopping 8mb of RAM!

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:03 am

I think someone else might have mentioned it, actually. I'm pretty sure I remember that topic though. I think it was one of the recurring Firefox/bird vs MYIE2 vs Opera topics...

Here is is

I actually forgot you could do that...

Skynet · Post by **Skynet** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:12 am

Ah so it was sixteen-bit then.

It's still a cool trick. So you can either have this tiny ass little banner you can't read (zoomed out all the way) or a massive rectangle of colour (if you zoom in far enough).

Either way you can't read what the banner is saying

Post by **Quzar** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 7:31 am

Newer versions dont let you do that =P. The newest version's ad is actually a thin strip that goes across the whole top. If you update from an older version though, it doesnt do that.

Ive never used opera on a low resource machine, but on my desktop it can start to use up to 400mb of ram after being opened for a few days. (right now its using 100mb but thats after having reset 2 days ago[opera, not the PC]).

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 8:02 am

Opera does that, but I think it's by design more than anything. If you have enough memory free, it'll cache pretty much everything you look at. That's part of the reason that Opera seems so fast. However, if you don't have much spare memory, it doesn't cache as much. It's quite usable on an old system with a slow CPU and no memory, but it's obviously not as fast as it would be on newer hardware.